Google Gemini Is Conversationally Precocious, But Still Awkward

Alex Cranz, writing for The Verge:

But then Gemini Live kept talking. And talking. The Verge team was packed in a glass booth, and as Gemini Live droned on, a friendly Google employee encouraged me to “go ahead and interrupt it.”

It felt weird! I don’t mind interrupting Google Assistant in my car. In fact, I can be downright abusive to most of these bots. I call them names and interrupt them with ease. But Gemini Live felt different. The pleasing masculine tone of the voice, the easy way it spoke. It felt a little too human for me to interrupt.

My next question led to a similar interaction. I asked for ideas on how to entertain my dog, and Gemini Live just started talking. The only way I could get it to stop was to interrupt it. Which I did repeatedly. It was like talking to my 9-year-old godson. Like him, Gemini Live doesn’t know how to read the cues on my face, doesn’t know when to acknowledge that, actually, I don’t care as much about the subject at hand as it does.

The comparison to a 9-year-old is apt. There’s no path to LLM assistants not being socially awkward without going through stages of sometimes-embarrassing awkwardness.

★ Saturday, 17 August 2024